Strangers in the Night

by Flex, Raymond S

His chest felt tight, and he could feel something clinging to his wrist.

  He breathed in, trying to regain his senses.

  And really knowing that he was helpless.

  That he had been . . . rendered helpless.

  When Mitts finally did get his eyes open all the way, when he managed to distinguish forms from the blindingly bright, white light, he realised that he was back in his bedroom.

  The twitch of the springs in the camp-bed mattress beneath him.

  The plastic container.

  His wristwatch lying beside his bed.

  He blinked again.

  Trying to draw the scene clear.

  Three figures—three of them.

  One sat on the bed.

  The other two hung back.

  Just shadowy blurs for now.

  But, with another few blinks, Mitts drew them clear.

  He made out his mother and father.

  His father supporting his mother.

  Both of them with anxiety strewn across their features.

  Anxiety for him.

  He felt a warmth pass through his blood.

  And then he turned his attention onto the foreground.

  Onto Heinmein who perched on the edge of the mattress. His fingers coiled about Mitts’s wrist. Taking his pulse.

  Heinmein’s palms were a touch sweaty.

  He wanted Heinmein to release him.

  But when Mitts looked beyond the ragged, white lab coat, and up into those black eyes, he couldn’t help but see the determined drive staring right back at him.

  The doctor counting out the beats of Mitts’s heart within his mind.

  Measuring Mitts’s health, comparing it to whatever cold, hard statistics he used to keep tabs on human-life signs.

  Finally, Heinmein released Mitts’s wrist.

  Heinmein retreated from the bed. Without another word to anybody, his clipboard dangling down from his fingers, he limped out of Mitts’s bedroom.

  Brought the metal door shut behind him with a distant clang.

  Mitts turned his attention back to his parents. His brain still felt somewhat foggy. And he could feel a tingling sensation dancing its way all across his skin. He tried to sit up, but it was impossible, he only slunk back down onto the camp-bed mattress.

  Felt the springs jutting into his spine.

  Someone—his mother . . . his father?—had dressed him in his pyjamas.

  When Mitts looked up again, both his parents were staring down at him.

  Both of them wearing looks of deep concern on their faces.

  He took in his mother’s face.

  He caught sight of her black hair, cropped back to the nape of her neck. She wore a nightgown, as if Mitt’s father had only just roused her from sleep.

  Mitts’s father wore the shirt, as he had before. That splodge of tomato sauce still there, as yet uncleaned.

  Mitts saw how those dark circles continued to cling to the bases of his mother’s eye sockets. That her eyeballs were webbed with red veins. She seemed to have grown thin, just as Mitts had.

  He wished there might be something he could do for her.

  Something he could do to help her condition.

  But, feeling his energy waning once more, he knew he didn’t even have enough strength to help himself.

  If only he’d been bigger.

  If only he’d been born stronger.

  Then maybe . . . maybe . . .

  Mitts looked to his father, standing to his left, and then to his mother, who had taken up a position on his right. He thought back on what his father had said; the last thing he remembered.

  In the kitchen.

  That puff of buttery steam from the pot.

  The crippling nausea which’d gripped him.

  How he’d slipped from the stool and fell.

  Right . . .

  . . . Down.

  It’d all gone black.

  Or had it?

  Mitts recalled something, some sort of a . . . another world?

  Those dark-purple hills.

  That buffeting wind.

  And then . . . darkness.

  Mitts realised his parents were speaking to him.

  Slowly, their voices made sense.

  At first, they were as indiscernible as the beating of birds’ wings.

  Mitts had to concentrate.

  He screwed up his forehead.

  His father’s voice; first, thick and gruff, came to him.

  “. . . How’re . . . feeling?”

  Mitts tried to nod back to his father, but, in that second, he was blindsided by an overwhelming migraine. It ripped through his brain.

  Laid waste to what might’ve been rational thoughts.

  Rational words.

  In the end, Mitts heard himself groan.

  He felt his mother’s cool touch against his cheek.

  It calmed him.

  Slowed his swiftly beating heart.

  He turned to her now.

  Feeling the creeping, tingling sensation all through his blood, Mitts tried his best to clear his mind. To bring his mother clear. But her features continued to blur.

  He made out her lips.

  Distinguished words.

  At last.

  One long string of clarity.

  “Doctor Heinmein,” she said, “he will be back in a few moments, with some medicine, something that will help.”

  Mitts couldn’t quite recall if Heinmein entered his bedroom then . . . or if it happened several minutes later.

  But the world, soon after, was lost in a cacophony of sulphur-smelling chemicals.

  And dreary, drug-induced sleep.

  * * *

  Mitts woke feeling a chill.

  It was like those mornings, back home, in early September. The time in the year just before his parents would switch on the central heating. Sometimes Mitts would wake up shuddering, almost unable to breathe, from the cold of the night.

  He would pry himself up out of bed, shove his duvet off him and go fetch his black, fleecy jumper out of his chest of drawers.

  Then he would tug his duvet back up and shiver himself into some sort of a light sleep until the brightening morning woke him later.

  On those mornings, he always asked his mother to make hot chocolate for breakfast.

  He remembered, feeling the bags tugging at the bases of his eye sockets, how he would peer down into his swirling cup; breathing in the gentle, smooth odour of chocolate, feeling it channel warmth back into his bones as if it was some kind of elixir.

  When Mitts glanced about the room—the room within the Compound where he was now—he saw that it was dark, all except for a single light source.

  It took him a couple of moments to figure out it was a torch.

  A sickly, yellow circle of light illuminated a shadowy corner of the room.

  It was strange, now, to see anything that wasn’t rendered by the striking, too-bright white fluorescent lights of the Compound.

  There was something almost natural about the torchlight.

  Mitts lifted himself a little up off his spring-loaded, camp-bed mattress.

  The springs creaked out beneath him.

  He could tell there was a person sitting there—slumped—resting upon his plastic container. He realised the plastic container had been moved away from its previous position just below the ventilation hatch.

  He wondered if anybody: his mother, his father, Heinmein might’ve taken a look inside.

  If they had then surely they would’ve discovered the screwdrivers there.

  Perhaps somebody had noticed the screwdrivers had gone missing from the maintenance cupboard. Even though Mitts had gone out of his way to snatch the screwdrivers from a little-used cupboard, he couldn’t help feeling that—somehow—fate might’ve conspired against him.

  Made it so he simply wouldn’t be allowed to get away with what it was he hoped to achieve.

  The figure slumped up in the corner. He held a book in his hand.

/>   The figure aimed a glance at him.

  Mitts finally recognised his father’s profile.

  How his father had his sleeves rolled up.

  His father, still in silhouette, folded the page of his book and laid it down carefully on top of the plastic container. Then he trod on over to Mitts.

  As he drew closer, as Mitts used the torchlight to read his father’s face, he saw his eyelids were drooping. Like his mother, his father had black bags beneath his eye sockets.

  Even how he had approached the bed, he could tell that his father’s energy was depleted, that his shoulders sagged, that his gait dragged.

  Mitts wondered if the Compound had sapped his father’s strength.

  As it had sapped his own.

  His father perched down lightly on the edge of the mattress.

  Mitts heard the springs within his camp bed slink back and forth.

  His father reached forward and laid his hand across Mitts’s forehead. “How’re you feeling?” he said.

  Mitts tried to swallow, but felt as if something blocked his throat.

  When he tried to cough it loose, he rendered himself unable to breathe.

  It was only with his father’s help that he was eventually able to sit upright in bed.

  Mitts looked to his father, feeling his eyes streaming with tears from the effort of trying to clear his throat. Mitts’s chest tickled and he could feel a tightening sensation over his veins. Although Mitts had never wanted to as a kid—back when he’d been carefree, and they’d lived at home—he now had a seemingly irrepressible desire to go run through a park somewhere.

  Just rush back and forth, grinning all over.

  Feeling the tickle of oxygen flowing into his lungs.

  Bringing him back to life.

  But that life was gone now.

  The Compound was all that remained.

  Just Mitts and his mother, and his father.

  Having got his coughing fit under some sort of control, and trying to ease his weary body, he looked to his father.

  His father attempted a smile, but it withered and died upon his lips.

  He looked away from Mitts, as if he couldn’t bear to look him in the eye.

  As if it was all it would take to set things right again, Mitts reached out and grasped hold of his father’s thigh. He gave it a squeeze. “I’m . . . I’m okay, Dad,” Mitts got out.

  But, the truth was, Mitts felt very far from ‘okay’.

  In fact, even right then, he could feel the swirling nausea returning to him.

  And there was nothing he could do.

  Except lie himself down.

  Stare up at the ceiling.

  And wish it away.

  * * *

  The next time Mitts woke, he realised that he’d been dreaming about those dark-purple hills.

  About the buffeting winds.

  And he had smelled that sulphuric odour, all around him.

  On his clothes.

  In his mouth.

  In his lungs.

  His mouth tasted of pill capsules: that plasticky, nothing taste.

  He could hear a light hum in his ears.

  When Mitts looked about himself, still feeling those pinpricks of pain from the coughing fit who knew how many hours ago, he realised that the main light in his room was illuminated.

  That, once more, the bright, white light had returned.

  That meant it was daytime.

  Heinmein had put the lights in the entire Compound on a timer so that it might emulate the day.

  But the sun was one thing, and artificial light was another.

  And Mitts couldn’t say that he felt any the better for the bright, white light which streamed through the room.

  Now, though, Mitts was alone.

  He looked across the room, to the plastic container, where his father had been sat. The torch was still there, lying on top of it. And the book his father had been reading was there too.

  Mitts breathed in deeply. He wondered if he had the strength—if he still had the strength—to hoik himself up. To set himself on his own two feet.

  There was only one way to find out.

  He had to try.

  Mitts shovelled off his blanket—easier to summon the strength than he had imagined—and he eased his body over to the edge of his camp bed.

  The slipping and sliding of the springs beneath him sent jitters through his body.

  He so wished that they would be silent.

  He recalled his bed back home, when he could easily move around without making so much as a sound. That time was gone, though . . . no point wondering after the past . . .

  Now at the edge of his bed, Mitts summoned the strength to dangle his legs, to have his toenails scrape the laminate flooring.

  He glanced up to his bedroom door, half expecting to see either his mother or father there, looking on.

  With some vacant expression on their face.

  But there was no one.

  He was alone.

  Somewhat heartened by his efforts so far, Mitts used the metal frame of his camp bed to help himself up onto the soles of his feet. Still holding the metal frame, he felt his balance come and go, as if he hadn’t stood for weeks rather than a matter of hours.

  Finally, he caught the courage to stand by himself.

  Though he didn’t feel one-hundred-percent natural standing on his own two feet, he could keep himself more or less still.

  That was the important thing.

  Just stand up.

  All for now.

  After what must’ve been a minute, Mitts eased himself along past his camp bed, headed for the door of his bedroom. Although he had no destination in mind beyond that, he couldn’t help but make it his goal. It was only when he’d got about halfway across his bedroom floor that he realised he had a strong urge to urinate.

  He glanced toward the en-suite bathroom, realising he would need to make a detour.

  It took him the best part of what must’ve been a minute to reach it.

  When he got done in there, he realised he could hear voices out in the corridor.

  Outside his bedroom.

  Still standing in the bathroom, Mitts concentrated his hearing onto those people, trying to separate the voices into identities.

  He recognised one voice as belonging to his father.

  Feeling that same queasiness coming on—that same giddy sensation—Mitts blinked several times, managing to clear it away as best he could.

  As his father’s voice droned on—Mitts could make no sense of the words—he realised that he must be out in the corridor with Heinmein.

  Mitts held his ground, wanting to see where this conversation was headed. But he realised, from where he stood, there would be very little he could make out distinctly.

  So he headed back to his bed.

  He slumped down.

  Sent the springs of the camp-bed mattress creaking all over again.

  Mitts drew his blanket back over himself, only then realising he was wearing the black fleece he would often put on for those unexpectedly cold early mornings.

  He supposed either his mother or father had decided he needed the extra warmth and had dressed him in it.

  Mitts could still hear his father’s juddering voice in the one-way conversation. He willed it to stop. It was almost as if every word his father spoke was a hammer pounding his skull.

  He could feel the giddiness returning.

  Perhaps it had been a mistake for him to get up out of bed.

  But he had gone and done it.

  Too late for regrets . . .

  Outside, Mitts was aware that the conversation had come to a halt.

  Neither his father or Heinmein spoke.

  Mitts could hear the sound of footsteps—of that sweep-plod—heading away from his bedroom.

  There was a pair of—almost apologetic—knocks up against his metal bedroom door.

  And then the hinges creaked.

  Mitts’s father appeare
d there.

  He was dressed in a clean shirt now.

  If Mitts hadn’t known it was a new day from the fluorescent strip lights powering on, he would’ve known it from his father’s lime-green, chequered shirt; the sleeves rolled up just above the elbows.

  He wore the same loafers and jeans as the day before.

  Or, at least, Mitts believed he did.

  His father held one of the metal bowls from the kitchen. That was strange in itself seeing that his father was the mouthpiece for Mitts never—ever—eating outside the kitchen.

  As his father approached, things got blurry again, but Mitts managed to keep his brain together.

  To keep reality somewhat present before his eyes.

  “Dad?” Mitts managed to get out.

  If his father smiled, Mitts didn’t see it.

  Just like before, his father perched down on the edge of his camp bed. He passed the bowl toward him, and said, “Good to see you’re awake.”

  Mitts raised a smile, then took the bowl. He saw that it was cereal with powdered milk. He didn’t like cereal at the best of times, and much less with powdered milk, but he felt strangely ravenous.

  He seized hold of the spoon and dug in.

  Only when Mitts had got about three quarters of the way through his cereal, and he looked up at his father, did he note the extreme concern in his face. How his father’s eyes seemed almost as if they were strung with hair-triggers, and that they were scoping out every one of Mitt’s movements as if any one might be his last.

  Mitts tried to smile but found himself shaking almost uncontrollably.

  It was a challenge for him to finish the cereal.

  But he did.

  He handed the bowl back to his father.

  The two of them sat on the edge of the camp bed for a long time. Mitts realised he could hear the strangest of sounds. Coming from his father’s throat. A sort of croaking sound. Like his father was trying as hard as he could to keep something inside.

  In the end, Mitts decided to break the silence.

  “Dad?” he said.

  His father remained detached, staring into the air right before his nose, still clutching the cereal bowl. His hands were shaking lightly.

  Mitts could see that—in the process of bringing the bowl of cereal here—his father had spilled a little milk on the belly of his shirt.

  Mitts continued, “I’ve been having dreams, strange dreams.”

  His father continued to stare out in front.